“Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.”
James 4:4
I don’t suppose you woke up this morning with the express aim of making yourself an enemy of God. You are a Christian, after all. And Christians are supposed to love God with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their strength and with all their mind (Luke 10:37). If anyone is an enemy of God, surely it’s not you, right? Wrong.
James tells us that friendship with the world is enmity with God. That is, affection for, fondness of, and love for the world is hostility towards, alienation from and opposition to God. When James refers to “the world,” he doesn’t mean the physical world, such as mountains, lakes and trees. And he doesn’t mean the people of the world. He means the world in a moral sense. He means the spirit that is opposed to God.
You don’t have to look far to discover this spirit that is opposed to God. You find it in the strip club that glorifies sin, the sitcom that promotes promiscuity, the business magazine that celebrates greed, the populist leader who encourages white nationalism, the band that encourages drug use, and the website that promotes covetousness. And you find it in the pornography industry.
Pornographers, by definition, are enemies of God. They create and distribute a product that’s designed to entice you to sin. The goal of every pornographer is to get you to sin not just once, but repeatedly, in ever more novel and wicked ways, using their product. When you view pornography, you become best pals with the emissaries of Satan. You demonstrate your friendship with the world through your enjoyment of the wickedness that the world offers.
This, naturally, sets you at odds with God. When you enjoy porn, you voluntarily make yourself a friend of the world and an enemy of God in one act. You willfully turn you face to the world and turn your back on God. You choose to love what God hates, to enjoy the very sins that Christ died to deliver you from. This doesn’t happen accidentally, either. Watching porn makes you an enemy of God because pursuing porn means you “want to be a friend of the world.”
But today can be different, right? You don’t have to remain friends with anyone you no longer like, or someone whose best interests run contrary to your own. You no longer have to pursue the company of people who detest your Savior. You can decide today to hate the world and to love God. You can strive today to be an enemy of the world and to be a friend of God instead. After all, with friends like pornographers, who needs enemies?
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